Beyond a Boundary

In a masterly new novel, two émigrés find a home in post-9/11 New York.

In Joseph O’Neill’s “Netherland,” cricket is at once an immigrant’s imagined community, an emblem of foreignness, and, most poignantly, a dream of America.

Photograph by Chris Steele-Perkins / Magnum

Fiction has an entrepreneurial element, akin to the inventor’s secret machine, elixir, or formula. Many novelists have had the experience of falling upon the perfect scene or situation or character, the one that will breed meaning and metaphor throughout the book. Gogol surely knew that he had invented a devastating symbolic structure when he came up with the story of a devil figure who travels around Russia buying up the names of dead serfs; he carefully garaged his secret—in a letter, he warned his correspondent not to tell anybody what “Dead Souls” was about. When we read “Herzog,” we think: how brilliant and simple, like the best of inventions, to have turned something we all do (writing letters in our heads to people we have never met) into a new way of representing consciousness. And when we read “Midnight’s Children” we feel that Salman Rushdie has found a powerful controlling image in the impending midnight of Indian partition, the clock’s hands meeting in prayer.

I don’t know whether Joseph O’Neill jumped out of his bath in Manhattan shrieking “Eureka!” when he realized that, of all the possible subjects in the world, he had to write a novel about playing cricket in New York City, but he should have. Despite cricket’s seeming irrelevance to America, the game makes his exquisitely written novel “Netherland” (Pantheon; $23.95) a large fictional achievement, and one of the most remarkable post-colonial books I have ever read. Cricket, like every sport, is an activity and the dream of an activity, badged with random ideals, aspirations, and memories. It popularly evokes long English summers, newly mown grass, the causeless boredom of childhood. Its combat is so temperate that, more explicitly than other sports, it encodes an ethics (as in the reproving British expression “It’s not cricket”). But cricket in this novel is much more than these associations: it is an immigrant’s imagined community, a game that unites, in a Brooklyn park, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Indians, West Indians, and so on, even as the game’s un-Americanness accentuates their singularity. Most poignantly, for one of the characters in the novel cricket is an American dream, or perhaps a dream of America; this man is convinced that, as he claims, cricket is not an immigrant sport at all but “the first modern team sport in America . . . a bona fide American pastime,” played in New York since the seventeen-seventies.

The man’s name is Chuck Ramkissoon, and we first hear of him as a corpse. It is 2006, and the novel’s narrator, a Dutch banker named Hans van den Broek, receives a call in London from a New York Times reporter. The remains of Khamraj Ramkissoon—“It’s Chuck Ramkissoon,” Hans corrects, on the phone—have been found in the Gowanus Canal, and wasn’t Hans a business partner of the victim? No, just a friend, Hans says. Later, to his wife, Rachel, Hans describes Chuck as “a cricket guy I used to know. A guy from Brooklyn.” We don’t realize it yet, but the novel has just unfurled its great theme: this “cricket guy,” an Indian from Trinidad, is an American visionary—Chuck, not Khamraj—and cricket is the macula of that mad vision, and “Netherland” has opened where “The Great Gatsby” ends, with its forlorn dreamer dead in the water.

The unhappy news prompts Hans to recall his years in New York, and the first time he met Chuck, on a cricket field in Randolph Walker Park, on Staten Island, in the summer of 2002. Hans and his wife and son had been living in the Chelsea Hotel, their domicile after the September 11th attacks, “staying on in a kind of paralysis even after we’d received permission from the authorities to return to our loft in Tribeca.” Hans has his own kind of paralysis: large and fair, he is one of nature’s flâneurs, willing to be swept along by powerful events and people, curious but happy to turn a blind eye to human imperfection, fastidious but uncensorious. This reflective sluggishness maddens Rachel, who, already on edge after September 11th, announces that she is leaving him and America. Hans drifts, visiting his wife and son in London twice a month, amiably acquainting himself with some of the eccentrics at the Chelsea Hotel, and eventually taking up cricket, the game of his Dutch childhood.

There are moments when Rachel’s hostility seems a little undeveloped, and one suspects her absence from New York to be merely the necessary fictional trigger for Hans’s hospitable sloth. But, as with “Sentimental Education,” one can forgive a lot of stasis when the verbal rewards, page after page, are so very high. As Hans takes the measure of his newfound city, so the prose finds its own perfect calibrations. O’Neill writes elegant, long sentences, formal but not fussy, pricked with lyrically exact metaphor. Here Hans recalls the days not long after September 11th, when the city was an acoustic sensorium:

Around the clock, ambulances sped eastward on West Twenty-third Street with a sobbing escort of police motorcycles. Sometimes I confused the cries of the sirens with my son’s nighttime cries. I would leap out of bed and go to his bedroom and helplessly kiss him. . . . Afterward I slipped out onto the balcony and stood there like a sentry. The pallor of the so-called hours of darkness was remarkable. Directly to the north of the hotel, a succession of cross streets glowed as if each held a dawn. The taillights, the coarse blaze of deserted office buildings, the lit storefronts, the orange fuzz of the street lanterns: all this garbage of light had been refined into a radiant atmosphere that rested in a low silver heap over Midtown and introduced to my mind the mad thought that the final twilight was upon New York.

This is attentive, rich prose about New York in crisis that, refreshingly, is not also prose in crisis: it’s not overwrought or solipsistic or puerile or sentimental, or otherwise straining to be noticed. A steady hand and a good ear are required to dare the paradox of “all this garbage of light,” in which the noticer is both enraptured and faintly alienated, and which accurately tracks the forked European perspective of the novel’s narrator. The eye that sees the “orange fuzz” of the street lights is the eye that, elsewhere in the novel, alights on the “molten progress of the news tickers” in Times Square, the “train-infested underpants” of Hans’s little boy, “a necklace’s gold drool,” “the roving black blooms of four-dollar umbrellas,” and which sees, in one lovely swipe of a sentence, a sunset like this: “The day, a pink smear above America, had all but disappeared.”

Perhaps Joseph O’Neill is the writer this city has been awaiting: born in Ireland, reared in Holland, educated in England, and resident in Manhattan. If his writing has an English ease and classicism, it also has a world-directed curiosity, an interest in marginal lives which might owe something to O’Neill’s origins. (His mother is Turkish. His Irish and Turkish grandfathers were separately imprisoned by the British, one in Ireland and one in British Palestine, a history that he related in his involving, spacious memoir, “Blood-Dark Track,” which appeared in 2001.) As Hans moves around the city, he sees both natural and human wonders. There is the Hudson, covered with ice:

Ice was spread out over the breadth of the Hudson like a plot of cloud. The whitest and largest fragments were flat polygons, and surrounding these was a mass of slushy, messy ice, as if the remains of a zillion cocktails had been dumped there. By the bank, where the rotting stumps of an old pier projected like a species of mangrove, the ice was shoddy, papery rubble, and immobile; farther out, floes moved quickly towards the bay.But there is also Coney Island Avenue:

That low-slung, scruffily commercial thoroughfare that stands in almost surreal contrast to the tranquil residential blocks it traverses, a shoddily bustling strip of vehicles double-parked in front of gas stations, synagogues, mosques, beauty salons, bank branches, restaurants, funeral homes, auto body shops, supermarkets, assorted small businesses proclaiming provenances from Pakistan, Tajikistan, Ethiopia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Armenia, Ghana, the Jewry, Christendom, Islam: it was on Coney Island Avenue, on a subsequent occasion, that Chuck and I came upon a bunch of South African Jews, in full sectarian regalia, watching televised cricket with a couple of Rastafarians in the front office of a Pakistani-run lumberyard.

It is Chuck Ramkissoon who tutors the narrator in the marvels of this ethnic “miscellany,” when he decides to help Hans pass his driving test by appointing the Dutchman his unofficial chauffeur, responsible for insuring that Chuck gets to his various appointments in his 1996 Cadillac, “a patriotic automobile aflutter and aglitter with banners and stickers of the Stars and Stripes and yellow ribbons in support of the troops.” Chuck is reminiscent of Dr. Tamkin, in Bellow’s “Seize the Day,” one of the noisy urban braggers, possibly a charlatan but mysteriously seductive. Unlike Tamkin, Chuck has charm, and Hans succumbed to it in the summer of 2002, when he met him on Staten Island, and heard him talk about how cricket is “a lesson in civility,” and how “Benjamin Franklin himself was a cricket man.” Like the reader, Hans wants to know more about this dark-skinned Trinidadian, whose family came originally from southern India, and who wants so deeply to make himself an American.

Chuck bristles with enterprises. He has a kosher sushi restaurant, runs a private lottery (it is probably this activity that gets him killed and thrown in the canal), and has designated himself president of what he grandly calls the New York Cricket Club. O’Neill parentally rations our exposure to Chuck, using the novel’s temporal intricacy—it moves back and forth between 2001, 2002, 2003, when Hans returns to London, and 2006, when he hears of Chuck’s death—to give us suggestive pictures of the man’s flamboyance and yearning. The danger with self-exaggerating characters is exaggerated writing, but O’Neill knows how to sign rather than autograph. We get a quick sense of the man—of both his appeal and his type—when Chuck tells Hans that he needs a permanent wife and a permanent mistress: “Anne and me . . . we’ve known each other since we were babies. She’s been with me through thick and thin. . . . So we’re together for life. But my theory is, I need two women. . . . One to take care of family and home, one to make me feel alive. It’s too much to ask one woman to do both.”

Chuck may not have read C. L. R. James’s classic cricket memoir “Beyond a Boundary,” but he would have agreed with the Trinidadian writer about the sport’s affinities with all forms of authentic drama. One day, in January, 2003, Chuck takes Hans to the field he has leased in Brooklyn. This is where his New York Cricket Club will be—at what Chuck names Bald Eagle Field. (“It’s got scale. It makes it American.”) Hans looks at the frozen, snowy space and is silently skeptical. Now cricket begins to generate its meanings in the novel as easily as lilacs blossom, for O’Neill is alive, as Hans perhaps is not yet, to the larger implications of Chuck’s desire. The immigrant is choosing his plot of ground, and calling it his, as the original colonists did with their America. This is where “Netherland” becomes extremely subtle. Hans tells us that when he joined the cricket club in New York he was “the only white man I saw.” He plays with people from Trinidad, Guyana, Jamaica, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and becomes an honorary brown man. But, as a white Dutchman, educated in classics at Leiden and reared in a conservative family in The Hague, Hans is not a “colonial” like his fellow-cricketers but a colonist, part of the history of Dutch imperialism that has marked places as different as Java and America. Chuck talks about how cricket civilizes one; but Hans can talk unself-consciously about how a player is a specialist in “fizzing Chinamen” (a Chinaman being an unorthodox left-arm bowl).

Cricket in America puts all this, quite literally, in play. Hans, the white banker, can be only an honorary immigrant, something that O’Neill acknowledges by teasing out the question of Hans’s American driving test. It takes him the entirety of the novel to pass it, and he succeeds only at the moment when he no longer needs a license—weeks before his departure. The sort of document that would be crucial to a Chuck Ramkissoon is a bit of a joke to a Hans van den Broek. O’Neill beautifully counterposes the different origins and expectations of these two men, united by cricket: the upper-class Hans, who can come and go in America on a banker’s whim, and is paralyzed by the expensive torpor of his marital woes, and the modest Trinidadian, dynamic with designs, ever eager to be grounded in America. Chuck is excited by Hans’s Dutchness, and compliments him, in his usual showy way, on being, after the Native Americans, a member of New York’s “first tribe.” This ideological affection arises partly from Chuck’s determination to argue for cricket’s aboriginal status as the first American sport. The immigrants playing cricket in New York are the real Americans, the true natives, at once colonials and the first colonists. The colonials want to be colonists; Hans, the ancestral colonist, wants to be a colonial. In the summer of 2003, he is gripped by “real cricket madness.”

And all this would be abstract if it were not itself grounded by the novel—again, quite literally. Three times O’Neill takes us to Bald Eagle Field. The first time, it is Chuck’s snowy dream. The second time, sixty pages later, it is the summer of 2003, and Hans is astounded: the field is green and tended. “Jesus,” he says to Chuck, “you did it.” The colonial has successfully colonized his green breast of America. A hundred pages later, in 2006, Hans has left the States, is reunited with his wife in London, and has heard the news about Chuck’s demise. He sits at a computer and uses Google Earth to zoom over the old cricket field, and finds that it has browned:

There’s Chuck’s field. It is brown—the grass has burned—but it is still there. There’s no trace of a batting square. The equipment shed is gone. I’m just seeing a field. I stare at it for a while. I am contending with a variety of reactions, and consequently with a single brush on the touch pad I flee upward into the atmosphere and at once have in my sights the physical planet, submarine wrinkles and all—have the option, if so moved, to go anywhere. From up here, though, a human’s movement is a barely intelligible thing. Where would he move to, and for what? There is no sign of nations, no sense of the work of man. The USA as such is nowhere to be seen.

Reflection on what became of Chuck and his cricket dream causes Hans to recall a recent holiday in India, where he saw a column of poor workers by the side of the road. “They were small and thin and poor and dark-skinned, with thin arms and thin legs. They were men walking in the forest and the darkness.” For some reason, Hans tells us, he keeps on seeing these men. “I do not think of Chuck as one of them, even though, with his very dark skin, he could have been one of them. I think of Chuck as the Chuck I saw. But whenever I see these men I always end up seeing Chuck.”

The simplicity of the writing here and the choosing of a frozen racial emblem echo V. S. Naipaul, that Trinidadian Indian, and, if “Netherland” pays homage to “The Great Gatsby,” it is also in some kind of knowing relationship with “A House for Mr. Biswas.” These are large interlocutors, but “Netherland” has an ideological intricacy, a deep human wisdom, and prose grand enough to dare the comparison. Less desperately than Biswas, less comically, too, Chuck is searching for a house, a home, and so is Hans, adrift in a New York at once fascinating and a little estranging. O’Neill has Naipaul’s gift for creating unforced novelistic connections in a world of forced ideological connections. And he knows perfectly well that when, on the last pages of his novel, he writes about a memory of Manhattan’s skyline and the “extraordinary promise in what we saw” he is hovering, like some novelistic Google Earther, over the sentence grids and prose plateaus of the last page of “The Great Gatsby.” He knows, as some of us had forgotten, that the last page of that novel contains not just a green breast and a blue lawn but an old island that flowered once “for Dutch sailors’ eyes.” ♦

James Wood has been a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker since 2007. His latest novel, “Upstate,” was published last year.